I love hearing people's predictions for the next year, Mark! Here are mine.

The overall focus on mobile will continue to gain momentum - including both shortening and focusing content, and optimizing campaigns for mobile (which includes a focus on load times and building mobile-aware or responsive emails). This is a good thing.

I think mobile opens will continue to increase, but not at the rate we have seen over the past year or two.

I hope a lot of people will embrace CSS animation, SVG, web fonts and the like - but I don't think we will see a huge uptake here beyond smaller, forward thinking companies using them. I hope I'm surprised here, but I've also worked with larger clients and understand their reluctance to embrace newer technologies. I do think we will see more use of video and GIFs in emails - they are a great way to add value to campaigns, and people usually respond very well to them.

I think that a lot of people will start taking email marketing more seriously - resulting in an overall better standard of quality in email newsletters and campaigns. A lot of companies are just now starting to understand the importance and value of great content in email, hopefully that will increase. And hopefully that results in email design teams getting the budgets and resources that many have been lacking over the years.

I think we will see real growth and evolution in the email design community. It's something I wrote about the community needing before, and 2014 is the year it will happen. Litmus has really started that with building this community, and a lot of people are contributing via blog posts, tutorials, and frameworks. 2014 will be the year we see email design legitimized - the community will grow, tools will mature, and knowledge will be shared at a scale we haven't yet seen.

Those are my big ones for the coming year. As always, I hope there are a few surprises for the year and I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks.

Prediction:
The increase in iOS/Android use and the new design/technical opportunities both offer will cause progressive enhancement to finally come into mainstream favor for email design. Instead of letting clients like Outlook hold back what's possible because of an unnecessary need for 'pixel perfection' across clients; companies will begin to realize that they can offer the majority of their customers (who are now opening on close to standards compliant clients) a higher level experience, while still providing the minority with a decent baseline.

The acceptance of this is the only way other predictions (css animations, web fonts, svg, video, etc.) will ever happen.

That's how I see it going, too. Email design is closely following the trajectory of web design, which made a similar jump a few years ago. Email design is just on a slightly slower timeline. While I think there will still be a lot of clients holding out over the next year, I believe we will get there one day.